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Bubbling Up From the Earth, a Cool, Clear Gift

Kay Westhues is photographing dozens of wells around Indiana that offer access to water.Credit
Erik Eckholm/The New York Times

CARMEL, Ind. — The most hopping place in this suburban town on a weekday afternoon is Flowing Well Park, where cool water gushes from the deep as a nonstop gift of nature, its splashes upstaging the drone of a busy road.

The aqua pilgrims, people who love the water here and the idea of drawing it directly from the earth, arrive in unending streams, driving from near and far and bringing plastic jugs. They come to collect liquid that, depending on whom you ask, tastes great or has no taste at all — which may mean the same thing— and that, best of all, is free.

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In Carmel, Flowing Well Park draws people with water jugs.Credit
The New York Times

In an era when communities in places like Maine and Michigan have fought to protect springs and aquifers from large-scale commercial bottlers, the open-access wells of America represent a vestige of the public commons, said Julie Ardery, an expert on rural culture and the co-editor of The Daily Yonder, an online magazine about rural affairs. But they are endangered artifacts: many of the wells etched in the memory of local elders have been capped or are just not to be found.

Here in Indiana, at least a couple of dozen remain improbably intact, mostly at rural sites that have sometimes been used for hundreds of years. State health officials said they monitored the safety of nine artesian wells that are officially classified as public water sources. Although at least one of the state’s artesian wells was at one point tapped by bottlers, most are too small to sustain corporate bottling, and many would surely be defended by local users.

The artesian well in Carmel, which is maintained by the city, is one of the best known.

Charles Keller, 84, a retired school principal, said he had been making the hourlong drive to Carmel’s flowing well for decades. One neighbor, he said, hauls the water to her greenhouse, insisting that it does wonders for her flowers.

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Avilla Flowing Well in Avilla is among the open access artesian wells in Indiana documented by Ms. Westhues.Credit
Kay Westhues

He had arrived only moments after Carole Hooper, 64, a sales clerk, who brought a trunkful of empty jugs. The well water that serves her home is gassy, she said, and the Carmel water tastes far better than bottled water. “My dog drinks it, and I drink it,” Ms. Hooper said.

Kay Westhues, a photographer from South Bend, is on a mission she calls Well Stories to find and photograph artesian wells that are still flowing and open to the public — living relics of an era when communities shared wells and when travelers, first Indians and then pioneers, planned journeys around such watering spots.

Ms. Westhues, 49, heard about the wells during an earlier project photographing rural diners. At a lunch counter in Delphi, she said, a man suggested that she go sample the great water at a nearby well. She was astonished to find people lined up to collect the liquid pouring from a pipe in the ground.

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Flowing Well Park in Carmel.Credit
Kay Westhues

So far she has located about two dozen sites in Indiana or nearby, and every time she roams the small towns of this farm country someone mentions yet another well used as a child, or one someone’s uncle spoke about. “There’s something about the flowing water that draws people back,” Ms. Westhues said. And at site after site, “everyone says the water makes great coffee.”

Artesian wells can seem like miraculous gifts because their water is endlessly driven to the surface by natural pressures deep underground; no pump is required. Sometimes the aquifers are discovered by drilling. Others gurgle to the surface naturally, feeding springs.

Ms. Westhues’s quest fits in with a trend in folklore and history to examine the culture of everyday life, said Ms. Ardery, who wrote about the project.

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A well at a golf course in Culver.Credit
Kay Westhues

Most of the working wells are in rural areas, though Ms. Westhues found one in a vacant lot in Gary, with tire tracks and footprints around it. Some flow into attractive structures of stone or concrete that someone built, others are channeled to a pipe that spills onto rocks.

At the flowing pipe in the town of Pittsburg, in Tippecanoe Township, Marsha Synowiek stopped with her container after driving seven miles to get water for her turtle tank, as well as for her family. “We use it to drink instead of buying bottled spring water,” she said, marveling that even during bad floods, the well water had tested safe.

The artesian spring that feeds the pipe in Pittsburg was used by Indians migrating along the Wabash River. It was also a rest stop in the forced relocation of the Potawatomi Indians in 1838, a wretched march to Kansas now known as the Trail of Death, said Phyllis Moore of the Carroll County Historical Museum.

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Great Magnetic Flowing Well in Plymouth.Credit
Kay Westhues

Some wells are steeped in lore that is, perhaps, too good to try to verify. In the 1920s, the Mudlavia Spring in Kramer was the centerpiece of a resort and hot springs where henchmen of Al Capone and John Dillinger reportedly went to cavort; the charred remains of an old hotel are said to be haunted.

Daniel Ricketts, 73, said he had heard since childhood about the Tree Spring, which is in a farmer’s yard near Covington and draws seekers from across the Wabash in Illinois. Mr. Ricketts, a retired shoe store owner, and his wife, Shirley, live in nearby West Lebanon, Ind., and fetch their drinking water from the spring every month.

“You can taste the chlorine in the tap water, and bottled water tastes like mineral oil to me,” he said.

Mr. Ricketts said that the artesian flow remained so strong at the Tree Spring that he could fill a five-gallon jug in three minutes.

“It’s like you’re getting the water right from Mother Nature,” he said. “I think it’s as pure as you can get.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 7, 2010, on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Bubbling Up From the Earth, A Cool, Clear Gift. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe